The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to further improve the ease of information transfer and convenience to users involves the provision of security for mobile devices. As wireless and mobile networking technologies have provided for more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer, manufacturers have developed mobile devices with ever increasing computing capabilities, thus enabling the execution of an increasing array of sophisticated software applications, which allow for the conduction of business affairs from virtually any location using a mobile device.
Given the increasing capabilities and availability of powerful mobile devices and increasing reach of mobile networks, users now depend upon their mobile devices to manage important aspects of both their business and personal lives. As such, financial or other confidential data may be stored on mobile devices and transmitted or otherwise manipulated using mobile device applications. Therefore, not only do users depend on their mobile devices to operate in a stable, secure state so that they may conduct their business affairs, but also desire protection from hackers who may attempt to upload malicious software code to mobile devices so as to destabilize or otherwise exploit a security weakness of a mobile device in order to access valuable data stored on or transferred to and from a device.
It would therefore be desirable to address security concerns in mobile devices by ensuring that devices boot to a known stable state and execute only those software elements that are known to be secure and to do so in a known order. Accordingly, it may be advantageous to provide users with improved device boot method, which may alleviate some of the aforementioned security concerns.